Ethereum's Next Upgrade: The (Solana) SVM w/ Sydney Huang (Eclipse Foundation)

**Speaker A:** Foreign. **Speaker B:** Hello and welcome back to the Strange Water Podcast. Thank you for tuning in for another fantastic conversation. Right now, building on Ethereum basically implies that you're building within the Ethereum virtual machine, which is the internal computation environment native to the Ethereum blockchain. I'm not going to plant this flag with too much confidence, but suffice to say that the EVM was conceived in 2013 and then written into existence with the release of the Ethereum yellow paper in 2014. Since then, the EVM has seen countless changes and upgrades, but the EVM from that paper still largely stands as the computational center of Ethereum. Fast forward to today and the EVM has exploded in popularity. Both alternate L1s and Ethereum anchored L2s have built their technologies and businesses around the dictates of the evm. This has had some incredible benefits. For example, tools are reusable, developers are comfortable and smart, contracts can be redeployed with ease. But it also comes with consequences. We're locked into the decisions and the paradigms laid out in that 2014 paper. Now, nine years is a lot of time in the world of crypto, and we've seen a lot of innovation in the world of blockchain VMs. Perhaps the biggest success is Solana, an L1 blockchain focused on speed, efficiency, and financial accessibility. While still smaller than the Ethereum EVM community, Solana boasts thousands of developers building applications with hundreds of millions of dollars of tvl. And because the SVM is a completely different environment than the evm, the Solana community is able to innovate on entirely different things. Today, when most people think about Ethereum L2s, they automatically assume that these L2s will exist with Ethereum like computing environments. But the deeper that you get into the research, the more you begin to ask yourself, is there any reason to limit ourselves in this way? Today's guest is Sydney Huang from the Eclipse Foundation. Huang have answered this question with a passionate no. Eclipse is working on building the first Ethereum L2 that leverages the Solana virtual machine. During this conversation, we cover everything you need to know about how Eclipse is bringing together the security and censorship resistance of Ethereum, together with the performance and parallelization of the SVM to create what they believe is the fastest Ethereum L2. One more thing before we begin. Please do not take financial advice from this or any other podcast. Ethereum will change the world one day, but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then. All right, let's bring on Sydney from the Eclipse Foundation Foreign. Thank you so much for joining us on the Strangewater podcast. **Speaker A:** Thanks so much for having me. **Speaker B:** Of course. So, before we get into what you guys are building at Eclipse, I'm a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it. So with that as a preface, can you tell me a little bit about, like, who you are, how you found crypto, and why you weren't scared away? **Speaker A:** Yes, of course. So I'm Sydney. I'm the product manager at Eclipse. We are working on a Ethereum L2 that's powered by the SVM to the Solana virtual machine. And I guess a little bit of how I got into crypto. I bought etherium back in 2017, so, you know, two bull runs ago, I feel like that's probably when a lot of people started buying crypto. And I bought it purely because one of my friends said, like, an offhand comment of, oh, there's going to be a lot of things built on Ethere. I had no idea what he meant at the time. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah. **Speaker A:** Well, I think in hindsight, I think he was talking about, like, smart contracts and everything. But obviously I didn't know what he meant at the time. But it wasn't Until, I think, 2021, 2022 is when I really, like, fell down the rabbit hole. I started reading a lot about the tech and there's a lot of interesting problems to be solved, both from, you know, a technical standpoint, but also from, like a social coordination standpoint. And I was just reading every single day about crypto. I even have a notebook somewhere where I was documenting kind of all the different user experiences of interacting with crypto apps. As someone who, like, wasn't crypto native at the time, a lot of things are really confusing to me. I was like, what is a seed phrase? But that notebook, obviously is a. Is a great, pretty useful tool for me now to like, keep in mind, you know, sometimes you forget when you're crypto native that these are maybe unintuitive to someone who's not crypto native. So I started, like, keeping a notebook, trying out all these apps, and it just got to a point where I was like, I just have to go, like, you know, all in. You know, go all in into crypto and go full time in crypto. **Speaker B:** So, like, what is your background pre crypto? Were you a computer science person? Were you a finance person? Were you, like, not related to this world at all, but just, like, was enamored by it? Like, what. What were you doing? **Speaker A:** So I was in finance, so, like, right. For crypto, I was actually in. In ventures and venture capital. And that's kind of the reason why I was like, reading so much about the tech, because every, every venture capitalist and their mothers probably wanted to invest in crypto at some point. So I was doing a lot of research into it. **Speaker B:** No, that makes a lot of sense. My, my. I guess where that question came from is like, what were you doing that you had, like, both the desire and like, the capacity to just sit there and research for a couple of years and, you know, just to put my cards on the table, I joined crypto in 2021 or. Yeah, 2021. So relatively recently. And I only had time to like, do the research to go from, like, nobody to crypto native because I was unemployed at the time. So. **Speaker A:** Yeah, that helps. **Speaker B:** Yeah, that does help. But okay, so now, like, you've begun and, like, gone full research, like, you realize that this is like, what is like, worth like, really dedicating the next chunk of your career to, like, how did you break into the industry? And like, were there multiple steps before you found Eclipse? Or, like, how did you get from VC World to here? **Speaker A:** I first broke into crypto through, like, unstoppable domains. And it. It did feel a little like 2.5 web 2.5. So it was a nice transition. But then I think once I was there, obviously, you know, I. I love the product and everything like that, and I. And I really like the idea of decentralized identities, but I think it was just. Well, first it wasn't as crypto native as I wanted to be the experience. And also it was a larger team than I would like it to be. So I knew I wanted to go smaller and probably more like in the weeds. So I went from unstoppable, and then I was also doing some work for D Labs or D Gods and utes, so somewhat familiar with like, the NFT space and. But I just knew I wanted to go more like, technical than. Or consumer. So obviously Eclipse was a great fit, especially since I think Eclipse. Eclipse was very much in line with how. With like, the reason why I got into crypto in the first place. Right. These are a lot of, like, challenging problems that people are trying to solve. I think what we're building is pretty net new to the Ethereum ecosystem. So it's like a new territory, like unchartered territory, which I think is really fun. Yeah. **Speaker B:** Cool. So I guess let's like, take a pause from like, what you guys are building at Eclipse. We'll get back to that in a moment. But I think like the most kind of interesting and provocative thing about Eclipse, right, is that you're building Ethereum L2 using the Solana virtual machine. So like, let's build a little, you know, foundation for the rest of this conversation. Can you talk a little bit about like whether it's through your own research that was pre Eclipse or like what you've learned since you've been working there. Like, what is the really cool thing about Solana that you know someone like myself who I would embarrassingly but like actively call myself Ethereum Maxi, like, can you just help me understand as someone who understands blockchain but don't understand why you would walk away from Ethereum like, what, what is going on in Solana that is worth bringing on to Ethereum? **Speaker A:** I would say so I use both Ethereum and Solana like pretty often and on a day to day. So I definitely like higher value transactions. That's on E for me. But like day to day I probably transact on Solana more purely because the user experience is really great on Solana and that's something that we want to bring into the Ethereum ecosystem. Right. So I would say the builders in Solana are way more like product focused, whereas Ethereum seems more like tech focused if that makes sense or more like researchers academic. Whereas Solana, you know, I think the builders are focused on just building a good app or a good experience. So like if you do anything on Solana, if you're swapping on Jupyter for example, the swap is pretty much instant, the fees are fairly negligible, so the experience definitely is way more catered to the end user. **Speaker B:** So I guess we'll, we'll kind of pick apart like where that advantage comes from as like we understand what Eclipse is building, but I guess like, can you tell us a little bit about what Eclipse is? And you know, I think you can kind of assume some base knowledge of what an L2 is. But like, what are you guys trying to build? And yeah, like let's just start with the elevator pitch. Like what is Eclipse? **Speaker A:** Yeah, so we are in Ethereum L2 powered by the SVM like I said earlier, and we are using Slusher for data availability at least for the time being until Etherium is at a point where it can handle significant, you know, scale. But we're aiming to be kind of the fastest L2. So the experience should be very similar to Solana because SVM is such a highly performant, battle tested production Ready Virtual machine that we're bringing into the Ethereum ecosystem. It uses ETH for gas so you don't have to buy new tokens or anything like that. And it's way smoother, way easier for people to just onboard onto the chain. And of course we're inheriting certain security properties from Ethereum. Yeah, I think that's, that's the, that's Eclipse in a nutshell. **Speaker B:** Okay, cool. So let's like unpeel that one layer and like walk us through the actual architecture here. So you know, I guess like, let me just set the scene for what a like very typical, let's say roll up does, which is takes, you know, does all the transactions on its blockchain and then posts an entire record of every transaction and the state onto Ethereum Mainnet. And you know, roll ups are like a subset of this bigger category of L2s and Eclipse fits in this L2 category. So can you just talk a little bit about like where are all these pieces? What are all the different components that make the eclipse L2 possible and like how should we understand them fitting together? **Speaker A:** Yeah, so I would actually say probably L2s have a more stringent definition whereas like rollup is maybe more of a generic term but obviously like the like crypto definitions just like all. **Speaker B:** Yeah, for sure. No, no for sure. Point taken. But just in terms of like the architecture, what does the eclipse like L2 system look like? **Speaker A:** So we have our validating bridge or canonical bridge is on Ethereum. So that will essentially determine the canonical chain. So the roll up node will always look to that bridge to figure out what the correct, you know, ordering is, what the correct chain is. And because it's svm, it's actually easier to prove than like your, your traditional like EVM just because it's register based. And so we'll have like fraud proofs, it won't be live at launch, but we are iterating on it right now. So of course like fraud proofs will help with the, the security of the chain. **Speaker B:** Got it. So on the canonical bridge which is the smart contract on Ethereum Mainnet, the idea here is internally is stored like the state of the Eclipse L2 which is in Ethereum or sorry in EVM world is like literally just one commitment and I'm guessing it's something similar. And in SVM world and are the record of the transactions as well being posted onto Ethereum Mainnet or it sounds like that's where like Celestia comes into play. Right? **Speaker A:** Yeah. So we're using Celestia for data availability, which means, you know, any user can run a light node and make sure that Celeste is not withholding any, any information from, from the Eclipse chain. **Speaker B:** But yeah, Celestia and I think when you like, were originally describing this, it was like Celestia for now, but once Ethereum can like support, you know, truly industrial amounts of data availability, which, like, to be clear, what we're talking about is once dank sharding is implemented, like, is the idea is to move over, sorry, Eclipse data availability into the EVM or what's the thought process there? **Speaker A:** Yeah, so we're definitely looking into it. Of course, I think 444 probably is still not enough to handle the scale that we're, that we're targeting. But obviously, like, we're always open to evaluating all the different options. So if it's ever feasible, that's definitely going to be on our radar. **Speaker B:** Yeah, well, because the other thing I noticed on your website was the Eigen layer logo everywhere. And I guess another question for you is, are you guys looking at Eigen DA as like an. Basically what I'm trying to get to is do you envision that at any given point Eclipse is like tied to a specific data availability solution or is the idea that you're going to like kind of be spread across all these different solutions for resiliency reasons, for cost reasons, for all these things. Do you have a thought process on what Eclipse looks like when we have a robust set of choices for data availability? **Speaker A:** Yeah. So I mean, I feel like that's the beauty of modular blockchains, right? Is like you can take the best piece of everything. And so obviously if there's, if there is like a better DA solution then we'll explore it. But for now, like Celestia has das, so data sampling and just like the light, no capabilities that's like able to handle the scale and everything like that. So I think for us right now Slusha is the best choice, but of course, you know, it's modular, so we'll see as you know, how fast things change in crypto. So we'll figure it out from there. **Speaker B:** Yeah, and like, let's be real, it's basically the only choice right now. So. **Speaker A:** Mainet. **Speaker B:** Yeah. Okay, great. So I think that's good for data availability. Now can we talk a little bit about like, what sucks about the EVM and like, what is the SVM have that like really like will make the ux, I guess, like what are we getting from having that SVM environment? But Having the ETH level security. **Speaker A:** Yeah, I think, well, two things really. And I think this is like what, what a lot of people probably point to, which is just, you know, it'll be faster and cheaper. Right. So instead of sending a transaction and waiting, you know, a couple seconds or whatever it is for it to get confirmed, you know, it's pretty much instant using svm and of course it's gonna be much cheaper. And as we see like in a bull market, the fees get pretty crazy. And even in the last like week or so, with the spike in activity and token prices going up and whatnot, gas fees were already probably too much to handle like your average transaction for the average person. Right. I think in crypto we don't really notice it anymore, but for any other use case that's probably not feasible. So I think those two things, faster. **Speaker B:** Cheaper on Ethereum and like without getting technical. But like what about the SVM is faster and cheaper? **Speaker A:** So the main differentiator is that it's parallel. It's parallelized. Which means, you know, EVM is single threaded. So the analogy that I always use is like if you're crossing a border and there's one toll booth or you're trying to get into toll road and there's one toll booth, every car has to, you're waiting in line behind like every single car. Right. Whereas if there's 10 toll boots open, it's going to move much quicker. So that's kind of how I think about paralyzed versus single threaded. **Speaker B:** And these threads are about the actual execution of transactions that are submitted by users. What you're saying is that Ethereum just has this one lane highway where every transaction has to go through sequentially, where The SVM has 10 lanes or many more lanes. **Speaker A:** Exactly. So the SVM, if your transaction doesn't, it basically like isolates like state a little bit. So on EVM you can touch any part of the state, like on demand basically. Whereas SVM is if there's no like overlapping state, you can execute in parallel. **Speaker B:** Got it. And this is definitely too technical a question, so we will move on from this topic after. But does the SVM start to pay a lot of overhead for like isolating the state? Or are users forced to, or I guess smart contracts forced to do a lot of overhead or pay a lot of fees in order to bridge through isolated pieces of state? Or is that really not a problem because the state is so huge that like generally every slice like contains all the things that are relevant to it. **Speaker A:** Can you repeat that question? I'M not quite sure if I understand. **Speaker B:** Yeah, no, I mean, sorry, that was a dense question. I guess my question is, without knowing too much about how these things actually work, my thought would be like, well, it makes sense that if you isolate state, you can do a lot more things in parallel. But the problem with that is that users can't do anything that cross through these isolated pieces of state. And so my question is, does that end up forcing the SVM or users or somebody to pay a bunch of extra fees or overhead to like move through different pieces of isolated state? **Speaker A:** So I would say so in terms of cost, it's like Solana is optimized for like multiple cores. Right. So as, as we get like more hardware advancements, Solana should theoretically get cheaper and faster. And there is like this kind of myth, I guess, that, oh, it's like really expensive to run Solana nodes and everything like that. But I think for a very like basic, basic construction, you could probably run it for 300. 300 or so, which is still probably, we should probably still get that down in terms of cost. But I do think that'll come down as hardware advancements come online. **Speaker B:** Yeah. And I, I don't know even, I mean, $300, like, are we really saying that it's important for blockchains to have like, nomadic farmers in Africa be running these things? Like, I don't know. I think 300 might be a like, decentralizable price point. **Speaker A:** I like how there's, that's the threshold. Decentralized will price. **Speaker B:** Yeah. Cool. So can we talk a little bit about. Well, first you brought up an interesting point which is like, whether or not it's a myth or not, but like the perception is that like the hardware behind Solana is like super, super expensive and hard to set up. And like one, is that true? Two, do you inherit those problems if they exist through the svm? **Speaker A:** Yeah, I think it's definitely, I mean it's definitely not like trivial. Right. The cost of, of running a note Solana, it's not like, like for Celestia, you can run. There's the, the light. No, mean, which is you can run a light node on your toaster if you wanted to. So it's nothing like that. And I think Solana, like Solana alignment, what totally like recently revealed was that to be Solana aligned is about throughput and reducing latency, which is probably a little bit different than, than ethos of other ecosystem. I would say for us, we're not just, we're not just looking at Throughput latency. We're trying to preserve that as much as possible within the svm, but we still want it to be. We still want to have like DAS on the chain, for example. We still want to make sure that we're inheriting like security properties that are more like core to Ethereum. **Speaker B:** Got it. And does that require like a lot of changes to the SVM or like, because the SVM is this like computational environment and the things that you're talking about are about consensus, which is outside of the vm. Like you're not really forced to like do a lot of modifications. **Speaker A:** So there was. So we've explored like a lot of ways to design this and I think the challenging part is definitely like if we Merklize essentially. Right. Because it doesn't have merkle trees, but he does. So if we add a merkle tree into the svm, it would, it's. We tested it out and it, it really damaged kind of the, the throughput. So we scrapped that idea. Now we're on to like a different design. So there are some like intricacies in terms of how make sure it all like works together. But yeah, we're slowly figuring it out. **Speaker B:** Yeah, I mean that's why you are building a company around it. No, no, for sure. So let's pivot to the application layer. So for starters, can you like unpack what you mean when you say that the SVM is really about like ux? Like let's talk about as a user that wants to make a Dex trade or wants to like take out debt in a cdp CDP position. Like what, what does it mean to have better ux? **Speaker A:** How do I describe it? I wish I had my notebook of all my UX experiences. So it's kind of hard to describe. I don't know, it just feels like the. Even like phantom wallet, for example. Phantom wallet. It just feels a lot more intuitive than, than MetaMask does. Although I'm sure, you know, there'll be some improvements to that and whatnot. And there's some other great Ethereum wallets, I'm sure, but I think just it's more of like an ethos of the entire ecosystem that's more concerned about the average like consumer experience rather than maybe more of like the tech or the research behind it. Yeah, Trading on a Dex, for example, if you, if you go on Jupiter Orca, whatever it is, it's, it is especially coming from Eth. Like seeing that like swap successful thing pop up instantly was like very jarring to me in the Beginning I was like, what do you mean? Whereas before I was like, oh, I have to view Transaction, I'm watching Etherscan, I'm seeing like how many block confirmations, you know, all that stuff. So it definitely feels a lot more instant on Solana. **Speaker B:** And like how would you compare what it feels like on Solana compared to like what we're seeing in these L2s now? So like Arbitrum Optimism, like ZKEVM Starkware, like to do you. Is there compare, like, is it comparable what's happening on starkware with what's happening on Solana in terms of. Because it, because to me it sounds like what you're saying. UX is really just about like speed and the ability for Solana to feel like a modern computer as opposed to like a old system from like 1980. **Speaker A:** Well, I think with kind of the rollup centric roadmap and this whole idea of having thousands of app specific rollups, I think there are a lot of complexities around that, especially for the user experience. Mainly because now you're bridging over from chain to chain, now there's interoperability issues, you're fragmenting liquidity. So a little bit of history about Eclipse. We actually started out doing app specific rollups. So that's how we're able to kind of dog food the tech. And that's why like firsthand we understood, first of all the economics doesn't really make sense for most applications to become their own roll up. But second, the user experience just isn't there to like warrant, you know, all these different apps roll ups. So we think it makes a lot of sense to have a shared general purpose L2 that's able to, to handle kind of the scale that we're looking for. **Speaker B:** Yeah, I've seen a lot of companies that have like, are going down the route of like roll up as a service and I think that's like eventually supposed to be like app chain as a service. But yeah, I think you're totally spot on that until we figure out how to like really like the, the great thing about Ethereum was that all the liquidity was there and all like the composability was there. And while we're gaining a lot from this like roll up or L2 paradigm, we're losing this like core most cool feature. And so I think you're like totally right. That needs to be solved for. **Speaker A:** Yeah, exactly. I actually saw a tweet the other day that, that made me laugh. That was someone genuinely in, in distress asking MetaMask to add a search function in their networks because they were on so many different chains. Yeah, but that's just like such a good reflection of kind of the direction that we're going down. Right. **Speaker B:** So what are you guys doing on Eclipse? That is, with that in mind, how are you designing it to be prepared to hopefully win in a competitive crowded landscape, but also be integrated part of this ecosystem in a way that solves a lot of these problems? **Speaker A:** Yeah, so I think our thesis is that we don't think there should be thousands of rollups. I think there should be a couple roll ups. They'll handle most of the general transactions and then maybe a few more vertical specific roll ups. But there definitely shouldn't be thousands because that just sounds like a nightmare. And now you have dust on every single chain. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it. Share general purpose L2 with enough with, with like, enough like, how do I say this? That's able to just handle a lot of transactions at the same time. **Speaker B:** All right, so last question on like this application layer. I think that like some like real competitive advantage that you guys are going to have is the ability for this entire other like major ecosystem to port their like technology and their apps like from Solana to the SVM and like be, you know, an ETH roll up. Have you, I guess, like, how do you think about like these kinds of opportunities to bring people over without, you know, just like creating like fractured communities across like these two different ecosystems? **Speaker A:** Yeah, I think that's, that's one thing that was. Interlocia always says like modularism, not maximalism. Right. So it's funny that it's like, oh, is it? Are you either Ethereum Maxi or a Solana Maxi? Well, it doesn't really have to be that PvP necessarily and I think obviously it is like it's SVM. So it's very easy for any Solana developer to deploy to Eclipse or really any other SVM chains as a. If. If there are any that comes online. And I think we're kind of seeing the beginning maybe of the SVM ecosystem hopefully. Right. Like evm, EVM compatible EVM tooling. There's all, there's a whole ecosystem around that, whereas we don't really see that with svm. So hopefully with this we'll see more SVM adoption. **Speaker B:** No, I mean, I think that's like my favorite part about crypto, at least while we still have it, is that everything really is positive. Some, you know, and I believe that by you guys creating SVM based L2 that is just going to draw more developers in if you have the ability to. We've seen with the evm the ability to just clone your smart contracts and deploy on new chains has led to more innovation and definitely a lot more noise, but has definitely created most of the. One plus one equals three moments that we've had in the last, I don't know, since we started having legitimate alt chains. **Speaker A:** Yeah, I wish more people thought everything was a positive sum. **Speaker B:** Yeah, well, I think, yeah, especially like I too entered through the finance side and I think that us from the finance side don't really appreciate that. Well, but like all of the like real programmers and the open source people like definitely understand that. **Speaker A:** Yeah, definitely. **Speaker B:** Yeah. Cool. All right, so let's hop back down from the application layer and into the infrastructure layer and like, let's talk about like sequencers or you know, the actual layer of computers that are going to be running this stuff. So about 10 or 15 minutes ago we talked about like regardless of what the vibes are out there, it's like whether or not we're talking about today or in the future, it's not that onerous to run this kind of computer. But let's talk about like what Eclipse believes is appropriate for L2s in terms of decentralization. So like what is your guys's like, thoughts and strategies about how many like distinct individual people need to be running the Eclipse SVM nodes in order for like this whole system to like be, I don't know, valid. **Speaker A:** So the goal is always, you know, if Eclipse didn't exist, the chain could still run. Right. So if we take ourselves out of the equation, it shouldn't have any effect on the chain itself. So that's, that's kind of our, our North Star insert in terms of decentralization. Now in terms of an actual number, it's. We don't really like have that metric. Right. We're just trying to get mainnet out at this point. But yeah, once we, once we have all the pieces together, that's definitely going to be like a core focus of ours. **Speaker B:** Yeah. And again, I'm not at all trying to like pin you down or put you in an uncomfortable situation, but I'm just like trying to wrap my head around is this something that is like, okay, if we have 100 nodes running this and the fact that we have data availability and state root on Ethereum, so even if everyone was crazy, like you could still exit onto Ethereum, are we, is like 100 good or is it like kind of the Ethereum ethos of like literally more is better. Whatever it is, more is better. Like are you guys thinking about designing the system with that in mind or is it really first about getting it out there and then we'll talk about decentralization later? **Speaker A:** Well that's, that's kind of the beauty of rollups is that you don't need as as many nos per se. Right. Because since you are getting some security properties from Ethereum like forced inclusion, so say there's a sequence or the one sequencer is trying to not include a transaction, trying to censor you in any way you can essentially force that from Ethel1. So almost doesn't matter like how many are really running the, the roll up nodes per se. But of course there, there is, there's some thought around like shared sequencers and whatnot. That's been a really popular topic. You know, there's espresso, Astria and all those and I'm sure they'll help decentralize kind of that layer. **Speaker B:** Yeah, no, I mean I, that is like kind of where I was trying to push us towards is in these like companies or daos or like whatever, however we're organizing ourselves these days. But there's just so much energy around like first decentralizing sequencers and then second figuring out like the economics behind how do we incentivize like 30 different, you know, node software to run? Like is it different networks? Is the same networks? I mean I think what eigenlayer is doing is like a lot of work into saying you only need one computer and then let's shove all the computation onto that computer and then just use economics to make sure that it all works out. I guess. How much in designing an L2 does that go into this pre mainnet phase? Are you really thinking about the physical structures of the network or is it more just about technology and proof of concept and making sure that there's an ability to send and process transactions. **Speaker A:** Definitely focus more on the tech side. Right now we have to figure out obviously because it is a little bit more complicated in terms of just spinning up a EVM roll up. So if you have the bridge on Ethereum, how does that translate to the SVM when maybe they don't use smart contracts or using programs like token programs? So there is like some complexity there. How do you like do fraud proofs? I'm not sure if that answered your question. **Speaker B:** No, yeah, I mean I think it was a tough question. So let's like pivot forward and like talk a little bit about Eclipse roadmap. So very clear, like what's ahead of us is like a launch and that's exciting. Like maybe you can talk a little bit about that, but can you talk a little bit too about what does the medium to long term roadmap look like for Eclipse and what types of features are you really excited about getting. **Speaker A:** Out there in terms of the Eclipse roadmap? Right now we have testnet out and that is a realistic testnet. The contracts are deployed to Ethereum, the program is deployed to Solana, and it's also posting to the Celestia testnet. So everything is pretty much how it would be structured on mainnet. So that's where we're at currently and we're aiming for mainnet. Obviously we'll see how testnet goes. Mainnet developers will be after that. Once we make sure that developers are onboarded and everything's fine, we'll open it up to the public. **Speaker B:** And then for medium to longer term stuff, what features that you guys know are coming but like aren't going to like launch with mainnet? Like what, what are you really excited about? That is a little bit further down the line? **Speaker A:** Well, we have a lot of incubations coming out. So the, the idea that we, that we went in with is we want to Showcase kind of SVM's capabilities, right? I think a lot of EVM developers maybe are a little con or pigeonholed into kind of the constraints of Ethereum and the single threaded evm. So we have a lot of incub activations coming down the line which will really showcase the capabilities of Eclipse. And you can actually test that out on testnet. Right now we have a game called Chomping Glass as well as several other apps that you can test out and you'll really get an idea of what that user experience is like. So personally I'm really excited for these incubations coming out and obviously talking to a lot of the Solana apps right now that are working on compressed NFTs and just interesting use cases. So really excited to see that in the Ethereum ecosystem. **Speaker B:** Yeah, Wait, sorry, I'm not familiar. Can you talk to me about compressed NFTs? **Speaker A:** Yeah. So compressed NFTs is, I want to say it's like relatively new in the solana ecosystem on SVM, but you can mint I think like a million NFTs for a couple thousand dollars. I want to say don't quote me on that, but the number is, is pretty crazy. **Speaker B:** So, so this like new paradigm allows you to like Mint, like a massive, massive, massive amount of NFTs for like relatively tiny amount of money. That's what we're talking about. **Speaker A:** Yes. So there's like some interesting use cases, right, for like Deepin and yeah, I think Deepin probably is the most like prominent use case I can think of. But of course, like whenever you have something new, I'm sure people will come up with. With interesting use cases around it. **Speaker B:** Yeah, no, no, for sure. And then so this like paradigm is like specifically built out of like the parallelization and the features of the svm. And I guess like the unlock that you're trying to bring is to take these new paradigms that are like coming out of the innovation garden of Solana and make them available to people associated with Ethereum. **Speaker A:** Yeah, that's definitely kind of something that we want to do is highlight like the Net new use cases. Right. So one thing that's pretty common on Solana is like clubs like Central Limit, order Books and that's like much. You don't really see that on Ethereum. If you have to constantly adjust your position, that gets really expensive really quickly. And yeah, it's just not really feasible right now. So we're hoping to kind of bring a lot of those use cases. So interesting defi. Use cases, obviously, deep in use cases as well as the consumer stuff with compressed NFTs, we're hoping to bring that into the Ethereum ecosystem. **Speaker B:** Yeah. And I mean, I think something that is really important to highlight is entire categories are born when you have order of magnitude of scaling stuff. Right. Like when we started with the Internet, all we could do was basically send chunks of text and it took like minutes for it to load. But then like we had, you know, 10x improvement and then 10x improvement and then 10x Improvement and then like over and over and over again. And now we live in this world where like, I mean, think of like all the crazy things that you just see scrolling through like TikTok or whatever. And so I think like, I remember I went to Coachella in 2022 and we all got like this. So before the fall of Luna and the fall of SBF and all that craziness, the world still like didn't hate NFTs yet. And we went to Coachella and like we're given a free, you know, nft and I just thought it was like pretty interesting that it was all Solana. Like not only Solana, like backed by Solana, but it was like built into the Coachella app and you really like had no exposure to, like, the fact that it was like, blockchain. And like, so, you know, in my head I was like, why? Why do people even care if they don't know as blockchain? And like, that starts a whole nother discussion. But I think it's like the, the point of Moore's Law is that, like, by improving things 100x, like by a hundred thousandx, like, new use cases, like, open up. And so it sounds like that is like, the ethos of what you guys are trying to do with Eclipse. **Speaker A:** Yeah, definitely. And I also love that. That analogy of, oh, before, like, I remember Internet, you know, it's like loading a picture takes five minutes and you see it like one. One line at a time until it loads on the screen. And now if my intern takes an extra, like, half second, I'm like, what's going on? **Speaker B:** No, for sure. And, like, it allows. You know, I think another good example is this whole, like, crazy thing that happened with Silicon Valley bank, right? And, like, forget all the good things. **Speaker A:** That, like, that happened. That, that. **Speaker B:** I know. **Speaker A:** Real. **Speaker B:** I know. Can you believe we've had a banking crisis this year and, like, moved on for it? **Speaker A:** We had a pandemic, a banking crisis, and just life goes on. **Speaker B:** No, and so, but, like, like, that happened because our technology and our financial technology got so good that you could withdraw, like, you know, $50 billion from a bank overnight. And so that is, like. **Speaker A:** So are you saying now it's too good? **Speaker B:** Yeah, I think it's. Yeah, I think there's a lot going on. But anyway, so let's talk a little bit about, like, the. I think the big opportunity that you have in front of you, which is like, what we already talked about with the ability to draw a bunch of Solana developers over to the Ethereum ecosystem. But two is, like, the ability to transform a bunch of Ethereum developers into SVM developers. And so can you talk a little bit about what you guys are. First of all, how difficult it is to explain to an Ethereum the benefits that you get out of svm. And then two, how do you do it and what are the. The organizational efforts you guys are doing? **Speaker A:** Yeah, I mean, we definitely want to see SVM adoption, so bringing in ETH developers into the ecosystem would be great. So in terms of support that we have for Ethereum developers, right, obviously we have neon, which means that they'll spin up like an EVM proxy. They can deploy kind of the same smart contracts and have it be live on Eclipse so you don't actually have to interact or be able to, you know, code in Rust or whatnot. There's also like Soling, so compile solidity into. Into, you know, Rust. But there are some more like, intricacies around that. So you kind of have to know a little bit around just like specifying state, I think around community right now we're, we're like, that's definitely something that we're thinking about probably right behind the tech. We have to get the tech out first before we start thinking about community. You can't really have a community with, with nothing out there. But in terms of community, obviously we're ramping up our, our discord. So we do have quite a few developers in our discord right now. Even without us being a little bit too involved, which honestly is kind of a nice thing. We're almost like they're forming their own little community. But we're going to focus on that. A lot more will be more active within the discord. We'll bring in, you know, community managers and whatnot. In terms of conferences or events, that is kind of up in the air. Like we, I think we've had events at most of the conferences this year. We had a. I think we had an event at DevConnect, most recently an event at Breakpoint. So for Solana, several other events as well. But yeah, definitely thinking about it. But pushing to get mainnet out first. **Speaker B:** Yeah, well, I guess at like, especially at Breakpoint, like, what, what is the reaction that you get from developers when, like when you just pitch, like, SVM, Ethereum, SVM L2. Like, is it something excited? Is it in this world of like, orthodoxy and polarization, is that like, like almost like a bad word? Like, what is the reaction that people get that you get when you talk about Eclipse? **Speaker A:** I always love. I think most people have a very similar reaction, especially the Solana folks to our breakpoint. If you first explain first, surprisingly, I was, I was probably expecting a little bit more negative sentiment, but there really wasn't. I would say the reaction is, first, they're a little bit confused. They're kind of like thinking through it in their head. You can see the wheels turning and they ultimately reach the conclusion that it is a net positive thing. So the reception has been surprisingly positive, which is, which has been really nice. **Speaker B:** And I guess like, in this, while we're in this, like, mindset of thinking about these two communities, like how. What would you say is like the biggest thing that the Ethereum community doesn't understand about Solana and like, the Solana community doesn't understand about Ethereum. I'm just like so struck by your unique position of like straddling the two. Like, I'm wondering if you have any insight about that. That. **Speaker A:** I mean, I think for those two, it really is just difference in ethos. Right. Like, and that's kind of reflected in like every part of it, whether that's the infrastructure or the community. Like I said, Solana is probably more focused on, on throughput and everything like that. So everything they do is around that, whether that's infrastructure or the apps built on top of it. Right. That's a good core. Core tenant of a lot of the apps. Whereas on Ethereum I think it's a lot more like researchers, academic, like tech focused, solving like hard cryptography problems. Not saying the problems on Salon aren't hard, but I think it's just a difference in ethos and that's reflected in both the tech as well as all the applications. **Speaker B:** Yeah. And then do you, I mean this is like a huge question, but in the like, long history of blockchain, like looking forward, do you see a world in which like, forget talking about all these, how many L2s we're going to have? Like, like, what do you see about the L1 ecosystem in the long term? Like, do you think that we're going to have a bunch, like, including the names that we know today, like Avalanche, Salana, Ethereum or. And then a bunch more? Or does this kind of like collapse down into like a couple winners or even just one winner, which, like cards on the table. Like, I do think that the point of this is to have like one shared computational space. Like one. And that's why I don't like the term, but I'm willing to say I'm an Ethereum maxi because the point of this is not to have a bunch of playgrounds, it's to have one. And this is the one that we have. **Speaker A:** Yeah, I mean I agree with that in some sense and honestly, I wish I knew what the L1 wars is going to turn out because then they'll dictate what tokens I'm going to buy for sure. But of course, yeah, I think it probably makes sense to have. I think it's probably a similar situation as L2s. Why, where, you know, most people should probably be on a couple. And maybe there's some specific, like use case specific chains at the L1 level. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah. Or those sound like app chains. So like maybe they're. **Speaker A:** Or yeah, maybe they just sell. **Speaker B:** Yeah. Or they don't like they, they're just. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think that's like, kind of the crazy part about being this far out on the innovation curve is that, like, we're still worried about, like, getting technology that works that none of us have any time to think about. Like, well, how does it change the world? **Speaker A:** True. And I mean, it's. It's so hard to predict because you just don't know, like, regulation wise, what's going to happen. Right. Are they. Are they going to have, like, more private blockchains? Is that what companies want? It's. Yeah, just obviously I would love if everything settled to Ethereum or, you know, everything congregates to a couple L ones, but really hard to say. **Speaker B:** Yeah. Yeah. And I think we can go like, all day on, on that, so. All right, Sydney, like, this is incredible and, like, has really changed how I think about, like, what, what it means to be an L2 and, like, what the possibilities are. And I don't still really understand, like, I understand what you're saying about parallelization in Solana, but, like, now I need to go figure out, like, like, what does that unlock? So I just, like, want to first and foremost say, like, I think this is so cool and like, just something different that Ethereum needs in order to, like, really change the Internet and then through that, the world. So first of all, I just want to say awesome job, awesome, like, idea with Eclipse. And before I let you go, can you just, like, let everyone, the audience know, like, where to find you, where to find clips and like, if they want to learn more and maybe get involved, like, what should they do? Where's this discord you talk about? **Speaker A:** Yes, the infamous Discord. You can find me on, on Twitter. My handle is oxsydney. So 0x Sydney in true Ethereum fashion and Eclipse. You can also find us on Twitter. The handle is Eclipse fnd. Or you can find us Eclipse Builders. That's our website. And from there we'll link you to our Discord or wherever else you need as well as the docs. **Speaker B:** Great. Well, again, thank you so much for the time and for just, like, the energy and like, the different, like, thing that you're bringing to this, like, space. So I really appreciate the time and hope to stay in touch. **Speaker A:** Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Sam.